All About Lulu Read Free Page B

counselor. People come to her of fi ce and talk about the horrible things that happen to them. Like when their wife dies or their daughter d—” Stopping herself, Lulu cast her eyes down and retreated into a very real silence for the fi rst time. “I’m sorry,”
    she said, unable to look at me. “I wasn’t thinking about … I forgot that … ”
    “That’s okay,” I said. “Really, I mean it, it’s okay.”
    When she heard my voice she looked me right in the eye, and I was frozen in the power of her gaze. “I’m sorry about what happened to your mom.”
    “That’s okay.”
    “Do you want to sit down and I’ll fi gure out your astrological chart?”
    I swung my book bag onto the counter and took a seat across from her, a little jelly-legged. I stared unabashedly at her wild blue eyes as they scanned the pages, and her fast little fi ngers as they ri fl ed through her astrology books. Never had I been so completely and unexpectedly disarmed by a stranger.
    And soon I was talking. Talking like never before. Liberating my beastly voice without fear of humiliation, revealing my foibles without fear of judgment, and allowing this miracle of a girl to tickle the edges of my despair simply by listening to the sound of my voice, and something opened in my chest and tingled like a frostbitten hand regaining its warmth.
    The more information she volunteered, the more her little sing-song voice washed over me, the more I wanted to hear.
    “I used to want to live above a gas station,” she told me. “But not anymore. I still like the smell of gas, though. Just not on my clothes.
    What do you want to do?”
    “I never really thought about it.” And that was true, up until that
    very afternoon. But then it became crystal clear to me that I wanted to spend the rest of my days with her.
    “Really? You never thought about it?”
    “Not really. Maybe sometime I’d like to build something.”
    “Like what? Like a house?”
    “Maybe. Or maybe just drive a car.”
    “You mean like a taxi cab?”
    “No. More like maybe my own car.”
    “Like a race car driver?”
    “Maybe. But maybe not so fast.”
    “Hmm. Well, you’re a Libra like me, except that you’re on the cusp. Libras make good lawyers, but I don’t want to be a lawyer.
    We’re supposed to be optimistic, too. Are you optimistic?”
    “I doubt it.”
    “It says we can be indecisive, but I’m not indecisive. My mom says, honey, you don’t always have to know what you want right away, you can change your mind, you know . But I don’t like to change my mind. Are you indecisive?”
    “I’m not sure.”
    “That’s okay. My mom says, Lu, sometimes it’s better not to know the answer, because sometimes we’re wrong when we know the answer .
    But that doesn’t make any sense to me, because if you know the answer that means you’re right.”
    “Maybe she’s talking about wrong answers.”
    “But wrong answers aren’t really answers.”
    “I guess maybe if people think they’re the right answers it’s the same thing,” I said. “My dad thinks the world is made of meat.”
    “Eww.”
    “But I don’t. I’m a vegetarian. Not that I think the world is made out of celery or anything. I just think it’s the world. I don’t know what it’s made out of. A whole bunch of stuff, I guess.”
    “We should fi nd out,” Lulu said, not knowing that the invitation was the single most welcome invitation I would ever receive, and that the mere gesture meant so much that the dead spot inside of me started to ache in a good way.
    Over the next few months Lulu and her mother drove down from San Francisco almost every weekend, booking a room in the same hotel off Santa Monica. They hardly ever set foot in the room. Even their bags found their way to the Pico house. Lulu staged her things in my room, and Lulu’s mom carved out a spot in the of fi ce across the hall.
    Lulu’s mom was Willow, a hatchet-faced but relentlessly kind woman who reached out to me